The ceremony was attended by representatives of the European Commission, of the SCORE Consortium, of the Galileo Joint Undertaking, of the National Firemen and Civil Protection Service, of EDISOFT, international companies that were part of the project and other Portuguese institutes.
EDISOFT, considering its wide experience in the application and services’ area, is one of this project’s main actors, being responsible for the conceptualisation of the services’ platform, for the user needs’ analysis and for the definition and implementation of all field trials.
SCORE pioneers 3D geo-location
With SCORE, positionning services include, for the first time, the third dimension – height. Until now, only longitude and latitude were determined, a restriction that severely hampered the capabilities of all geo-location services, namely in what referred to, for example, a person’s position within a building.
Having as an example the New York’ September 11th events, if at the time, this system would have been available, it would have been possible to determine with high accuracy the floors from which the emergency calls were made.
SCORE is thus a huge quality leap that revolutiones the geo-location dominium.
SCORE is the 112 operational Emergency Assistance service, available through the EGNOS Global Navigation Satellite System EGNOS and that, later, shall use the GALILEO satellite constellation to provide an excellent performance in accurate geo-location.
SCORE is the 112 operational Emergency Assistance service, available through the EGNOS Global Navigation Satellite System EGNOS and that, later, shall use the GALILEO satellite constellation to provide an excellent performance in accurate geo-location.
This innovative 112 assistance service has a two-folded architecture: telephone assistance for emergencies and the coordinated search and rescue operations’ management – serving both the public and the professional services involved with the civil protection activities.
SCORE’s public demonstration successfully portraited two scenarios:
1. A person in distress in a forest fire, that calls 112 on its mobile phone. This person’s position is automatically determined by the SCORE system and a warning is sent to the firemen brigades on the ground.
2. An emergency call through a mobile phone in a building located in Lisbon. The person’s location is automatically determined by the SCORE system and transferred to the Emergency Centre Services that sends all the required assistance and significantly reduces the response time.
SCORE allows the geo-location of all 112 calls made by mobile phones in a more precise, reliable and effective manner, enabling services’ continuity, with respect to current solutions. SCORE’s architecture allows the position to be determined within a few seconds, which makes all the difference in emergency calls. This architecture enables a similar integration of different communication networks, including GPRS, TETRA, Wi-Fi and WiMax.
An innovative A-GPS server guarantees better performance accuracy than current commercial solutions. The SCORE solution is based in a detailed user needs’ analysis, performed by EDISOFT and considering the firemen, the police and medical assistance services. The Portuguese Firemen and Civil Protection services operationally tested SCORE during the field trials, under EDISOFT’s supervision.
(Credits Edisoft)